Day 74 Sales: Apple iPhone vs. Google Nexus One vs. Motorola Droid

Tuesday March 16th, 2010

John Gruber points us to this Flurry report on sales of the three mobile handsets, but this snippet at the bottom of the report caught my eye:

Ultimately, however, developers support hardware with the largest installed base first. For Android to make progress faster, from a sales perspective, it needs more Droids and fewer Nexus Ones going forward.

This is obviously not true for everyone; the Mac platform is still much smaller than the Windows platform, but all the best, most talented desktop application developers I’ve come across build apps for Mac OS X. Similarly, Symbian enjoys a much larger installed base than the iPhone and iPod Touch combined, but there are far more developers building apps for the iPhone OS than there are for Symbian.

Good developers want to build great user experiences, and will sway towards the tools that work best to accomplish those goals. The Mac OS X and iPhone OS developer tools are widely considered to be the best tools for building great applications with. Installed base is a factor of consideration, but not, as the report suggests, the only factor.